1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of unmanned aerial vehicles, and more particularly to presentation of events or objects captured by the vehicles.
2. Discussion of Related Art
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is either controlled autonomously by computers in the vehicles, or under the remote control of a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. UAVs are predominantly deployed for military applications, but are also used in a small but growing number of civil applications, such surveillance of pipelines, natural resource exploration, livestock monitoring, wildfire mapping, transport of medical supplies, etc.
A UAV may be fitted with one or more high definition cameras that can send streaming video to a remote computer for storage thereon. An operator of the remote computer can then review the stored video to determine whether any events of interest have occurred. For example, if the UAV is being used by police to investigate a drug smuggling operation, an event of interest might include images of armed people moving containers into a suspected drug storage facility. While the entire video captured by the UAV may include several hours or days worth of footage, the event of interest may only comprise a few minutes. Thus, it could take an operator manually reviewing the video several hours to determine whether the event of interest has occurred. Further, since the event of interest may occur in a short period of time, the operator can easily miss the event.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods and systems that can automatically summarize the events of interest.